By the time I
got to the front gate I could hear sounds of lamentation.
"A railroad train wants to run right through the middle of all their
dead people and Sallie started the crying. Dead's dead, and if Cousin
James wants 'em run over. I wants 'em run over too." She answered over
her shoulder as we hurried through the wide front hall.
And a scene that beggars description met my eyes, as I stood in the
living-room door. I hope this account I am going to try and write will
get petrified by some kind of new element they will suddenly discover
some day and the manuscript be dug up from the ruins of Glendale to
interest the natives of the Argon age about 2800 A. D.
Sallie sat in the large armchair in the middle of the room weeping in
the slow, regular way a woman has of starting out with tears, when she
means to let them flow for hours, maybe days, and there were just five
echoes to her grief, all done in different keys and characters.
Cousin Martha knelt beside the chair and held Sallie's head on her ample
bosom, but I must say that the expression on her face was one of
bewilderment, as well as of grief.
The three little Horton cousins sat close together in the middle of the
old hair-cloth sofa by the window and were weeping as modestly and
helplessly as they did everything else in life, while Mrs. Hargrove, in
her chair under her son's portrait, was just plainly out and out
howling.
And on the hearth-rug, before the tiny fire of oak chips that the old
ladies liked to keep burning all summer, stood the master of the house
and, for once in my life, I have seen the personification of masculine
helplessness.
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